This innovative book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean.

Charting the period that extends from the 1860s to the 1940s, this volume offers fresh perspectives on Aestheticism and Modernism. By acknowledging that both movements had a passion for the ‘new’, it goes beyond the alleged divide between Modernism and its predecessors. Rather than reading the modernist credo, ‘Make it New!’, as a desire to break away from the past, the authors of this book suggest reading it as a continuation and a reappropriation of the spirit of the ‘New’ that characterizes Aestheticism. Basing their arguments on recent reassessments of Aestheticism and Modernism and their articulation, contributors take up the challenge of interrogating the connections, continuities, and intersections between the two movements, thus revealing the working processes of cultural and aesthetic change so as to reassess the value of the new for each. Attending to well-known writers such as Waugh, Woolf, Richardson, Eliot, Pound, Ford, Symons, Wilde, and Hopkins, as well as to hitherto neglected figures such as Lucas Malet, L.S. Gibbon, Leonard Woolf, or George Egerton, they revise assumptions about Aestheticism and Modernism and their very definitions. This collection brings together international scholars specializing in Aestheticism or Modernism who push their analyses beyond their strict period of expertise and take both movements into account through exciting approaches that borrow from aesthetics, philosophy, or economics. The volume proposes a corrective to the traditional narratives of the history of Aestheticism and Modernism, revitalizing definitions of these movements and revealing new directions in aestheticist and modernist studies.

Explores cultural defence and revivalism in Scottish literature and artThe first book-length, interdisciplinary study on fin-de-sicle ScotlandUnlocks Scottish writers' and artists' participation in neo-paganism, the occult revival, neo-Catholicism and japonismeInformed by extensive analysis of under-explored archival materials, such as the Papers of Patrick GeddesRichly illustrated with artworks, photographs and ephemera As the Irish Revival took shape and the Home Rule debate dominated UK politics, what was happening in Scotland? This book reveals distinct but comparable concerns with cultural defence and revivalism in fin-de-sieI cle Scotland, evident in the work of a number of writers and artists including Robert Louis Stevenson, Patrick Geddes, Fiona Macleod, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Mona Caird, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Duncan and various contributors to The Evergreen. Situating Scottish literature and art alongside international developments in culture, especially the rise of decadence, symbolism and Celticism, Michael Shaw demonstrates the ways in which dissident fin-de-sieI cle styles and ideas supported and defined the Scottish Revival.

A unique introduction, guide and reference work for students and readers of Scottish literature from the pre-medieval period.

A Companion to Scottish Literature offers fresh readings of major authors and periods of Scottish literary production from the first millennium to the present. Bringing together contributions by many of the world’s leading experts in the field, this comprehensive resource provides the historical background of Scottish literature, highlights new critical approaches, and explores wider cultural and institutional contexts. Dealing with texts in the languages of Scots, English, and Gaelic, the Companion offers modern perspectives on the historical milieux, thematic contexts and canonical writers of Scottish literature. Original essays apply the most up-to-date critical and scholarly analyses to a uniquely wide range of topics, such as Gaelic literature, national and diasporic writing, children’s literature, Scottish drama and theatre, gender and sexuality, and women’s writing. Critical readings examine William Dunbar, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark and Carol Ann Duffy, amongst others. With full references and guidance for further reading, as well as numerous links to online resources, A Companion to Scottish Literature is essential reading for advanced students and scholars of Scottish literature, as well as academic and non-academic readers with an interest in the subject.

From Anglo-Saxon runes to postcolonial rap, this undergraduate textbook covers the social and historical contexts of the whole of the English literature.

Although a number of publications have appeared in recent years marking the importance of the ‘swinging sixties’, many tend to be personally reflective in nature and London-centric in their coverage. By contrast, The Scottish Sixties: Reading, Rebellion, Revolution? addresses this misrepresentation and in so doing fills a gap in both Scottish and British literary and cultural studies. Through a series of academic analyses based on archival records, ephemera and work produced during the 1960s, this volume focuses uniquely on Scotland. In its concern with some of the key figures of Scottish cultural life, the book considers amongst other topics the implications of censorship, the role of little magazines in shaping cultural debates, the radical nature of much Scottish literature of the time, developments in the avant-garde and the role of experiment in theatre, film, TV, fine art and music.

Considered a quintessentially 'popular' author, John Buchan was a writer of fiction, journalism, philosophy and Scottish history. By examining his engagement with empire, psychoanalysis and propaganda, the contributors to this volume place Buchan at the centre of the debate between popular culture and the modernist elite.

This book presents a comparative literary study of the works of four writers working in European minority languages - Frisian, Welsh, Scots and Breton. The author examines the different strategies employed by the four writers to create distinctive literary fields for their languages in the interwar era when self-determination had been promised to national minorities, finding that each had to make some degree of a step backwards into the past to enable them to make a leap forward. The book also discusses the problems resulting from this oscillation between traditionalism and modernism, drawing on concepts such as Pascale Casanova's 'littératures combatives' to make sense of these minority languages and communities within the wider European context. This study will be of interest to students and scholars of minority languages - particularly the four explored here - as well as twentieth-century and comparative literature, multilingualism, and language policy.

Archipelagic Modernism examines the anglophone literatures of the archipelago from 1890 to 1970 for what they tell us about changing identities, geographies, and ecologies.